Analysts see Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq:AKAM) as one hot business in the cloud space, but the Cambridge, Mass. cloud company is facing some heat with new competition.

Akamai has beat consensus earnings estimates for several consecutive quarters by an average of about 13 percent, and analysts expect the company to beat the current Zacks Consensus of 37 cents per share when it reports second quarter results at the end of July. The company reported revenue for the first quarter of 2013 of $368 million, a 15 percent increase over first quarter 2012 revenue of $319 million.

That’s pretty good news for Akamai, which last year added about 700 employees worldwide, bringing the company’s total workforce to 3,000. The company currently delivers between 15 and 30 percent of all Web traffic on a global level.

The not-so-good news for Akamai is that others want a share of that market, including a few former Akamai employees who have joined a new competitor, Instart Logic. Founded in 2010, the Mountainview, Calif. company provides a cloud-based service that it says will help Web publishers boost their site performance over Wi-Fi and mobile networks. Instart says it has figured out how to stream Web pages so they deliver two to 10 times the page download speed and time to interaction of websites that rely on traditional content delivery networks like Akamai.

The startup was co-founded by Manav Mital, Hari Kolam, and Raghu Venkat, all who hail from Aster Data Systems, a data management and analytics business acquired by Teradata for $263 million, and many of its early employees are former Google, Facebook, Amazon, VMware, Citrix, Akamai, Adobe and Mozilla employees. In fact, one of its advisors is Peter Danzig, Akamai’s former vice president of technology.

The venture-backed company - which has raised a total of $26 million from Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tenaya Capital - operates by charging customers the same as the content delivery network they use. According to the company, because it streams instead of downloading the entire amount of content, it moves about 70 percent on average of the amount of bits and bytes that a CDN has to push through. As a result, Instart Logic deals with the crazy margins, and customers pay the same while getting a boost in user experience.

Instart completed its beta program in December 2012 and a number of its customers are now using the service in production for mission-critical applications, according to the company. Instart did not disclose the names of any of those customers.

Also in the cloud services space are Rackspace (RAX) of San Antonio, Texas and Hewlett Packard (HPQ), which has recently started to move into the space with HP Cloud Services. Those companies, however, are less agile and plugged in than Akamai, according to Jared A. Levy of Zacks Investment Research.

According to Akamai Spokesperson Jeff Young, the two companies are not considered competitors to Akamai because "both Rackspace and HP have embedded Akamai's services in their cloud offerings."